up vote 9 down vote favorite
2

I have a program where an array gets its data using string.Split(char[] delimiter). (using ';' as delimiter.)

Some of the values, though, are null. I.e. the string has parts where there is no data so it does something like this:

1 ;2 ; ; 3;

This leads to my array having null values.

How do I get rid of them?

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You should edit your question to remove null and only state empty strings. string.Split doesn't give null strings, just empty ones. – Samuel Mar 11 '09 at 19:06

4 Answers

up vote 45 down vote accepted

Try this:

yourString.Split(new string[] {";"}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
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Beat me by a few seconds :( – Joel Coehoorn Mar 11 '09 at 18:25
3  
That does not compile. You need to use new char[]{';'} as the first parameter. – Guffa Mar 11 '09 at 18:44
Guffa: Thanks, I totally forgot about that. – DrJokepu Mar 11 '09 at 18:49
up vote 1 down vote

You could use the Where linq extension method to only return the non-null or empty values.

string someString = "1;2;;3;";

IEnumerable<string> myResults = someString.Split(';').Where<string>(s => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(s));
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You could possibly insert a .Select(s => s.Trim()) between Split and Where so that whitespace-only strings will get removed as well. – DrJokepu Mar 11 '09 at 18:29
1  
Note: The Split method never produces null values. – Guffa Mar 11 '09 at 18:45
up vote 1 down vote 
public static string[] nullLessArray(string[] src)
{
    Array.Sort(src);
    Array.Reverse(src);
    int index = Array.IndexOf(src, null);

    string[] outputArray = new string[index];

    for (int counter = 0; counter < index; counter++)
    {
       outputArray[counter] = src[counter];
    }

    return outputArray;
}
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up vote 0 down vote

You should replace multiple adjacent semicolons with one semicolon before splitting the data.

This would replace two semicolons with one semicolon:

datastr = datastr.replace(";;",";");

But, if you have more than two semicolons together, regex would be better.

datastr = Regex.Replace(datastr, "([;][;]+)", ";");
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